Deck: Most memoirs are written close to the experience. This one needed fourteen years and a lot of living before it was ready to exist.
There is a version of creative discipline that says you sit down, you do the work, and you finish what you start. Irene Tunanidas did not write her book that way. She started it in 2011, set it aside for over a decade, came back to it in 2024, and finished it through arthritic joints and writing sessions that sometimes stopped mid-page because the memories came back harder than expected.
That is not a failure of discipline. That is a book that could only be written the way it was written, because the person writing it needed to live more life before she could describe the life she had already lived.
Rising From the Abyss of Grief took fourteen years. Anyone who has worked on something long and difficult and personal will understand immediately why that timeline is not a flaw. It is the work.
Why She Started Writing in the First Place
Irene did not sit down in 2011 with a publishing contract or a finished concept. She sat down because she needed somewhere to put things.
Her mother had died four years earlier, in January 2007, after three years of full-time caregiving that Irene had managed largely alone. The grief that followed was serious enough that she has described it in terms of mental health, not just sadness. Writing was one of the things that helped her think clearly. So she wrote. She wrote about what those three years of caregiving had looked like from the inside, what the loss had felt like, and what she had been doing with herself since.
The writing came more easily than she expected. Her thinking flowed. She kept going.
This is how a lot of the best personal writing begins. Not with a plan but with a need. The need to make sense of something, to get it outside of your head and onto a surface where you can look at it. The fact that it eventually became a book that other people could read is almost beside the point at the start. At the start, it was just a person trying to find her way through something difficult by writing it down.
The Interruption That Lasted a Decade
The manuscript did not stay in motion.
When Irene took on a more active leadership role in the Ohio Association of the Deaf, the writing stopped. Her time and attention went to the organization, to the community, to the work that had always defined her professional life. The pages she had written went into a drawer. They stayed there for years.
This is also part of the creative process, though it rarely gets discussed honestly. Long projects get interrupted. Life does not pause for the work. The people who finish difficult personal projects are not always the most disciplined writers. They are often just the ones who come back after the long pause and pick up where they left off without making the interruption mean more than it does.
When Irene’s term as president of the Ohio Association of the Deaf ended in 2024, she went back to the manuscript. More than a decade had passed since she had last worked on it. She was older. Her body had changed. But the pages were still there, and the reason she had started writing them had not gone away.
What Returning to the Work Actually Felt Like
Coming back to a manuscript after ten years is not the same as picking up where you left off. The writer has changed. The distance from the original experience has changed. The relationship to the material is different in ways that are hard to predict until you are sitting in front of the page again.
For Irene, the return brought flashbacks she had not fully anticipated. Writing about her mother’s seven hospitalizations put her back inside those memories in a way that sometimes stopped the writing entirely. She had to step away, let her mind clear, and come back when she was steady enough to continue. Some sessions were short. Some days she could not write at all.
She also had arthritic pain in her joints that made long stretches at the keyboard physically difficult. The body was adding its own interruptions on top of the emotional ones. The manuscript came together slowly, in pieces, with gaps between them.
None of this is unusual for serious personal writing. The writers who talk honestly about their process will tell you that the hard material does not get easier with time. It gets more manageable, sometimes, but it does not lose its weight. You learn to work around the weight, to take breaks when you need them and come back when you can. That is what Irene did.
The Structure That Came From Her Faith
The book is organized into thirty days. Each day has a reading, a reflection, and a prompt or small action for the reader to take. That structure did not come from a writing workshop or a publishing template. It came from Irene’s Greek Orthodox faith and the devotional tradition she had practiced her entire life.
Greek Orthodox devotional writing is built around daily return. You come back to the practice every morning, every evening, regardless of how you feel about it. The structure holds you when you do not have the energy to hold yourself. Irene understood this from the inside, not as a concept but as something she had actually done during the three years she cared for her mother and the years of grief that followed. She and her mother had prayed together twice a day. When her mother was gone, she kept doing it alone.
That daily rhythm became the architecture of the book. Organizing grief by days rather than themes or chapters was a deliberate creative choice, and it came directly from a spiritual practice that had already proven itself in her own life. The form and the content are not separate. The structure is the argument.
On the Coleslaw
Day Ten of the 30-day guide includes a coleslaw recipe.
It is the detail people ask about most when they hear about the book, and it is worth explaining not because it needs defending but because it illustrates something important about how Irene thinks about creative work and what writing is actually for.
Grief takes people out of their bodies. It removes appetite and routine and the ability to make ordinary decisions. Putting a recipe in a grief guide is not a gimmick. It is a practical intervention dressed up as a creative choice. Getting someone into a kitchen, giving their hands something to do, connecting them to the basic physical act of preparing food, is a way back into the body and into the day. Irene included it because it worked for her. Not metaphorically. Actually.
This is the thinking of a writer who is not interested in producing an object that looks like a book. She is interested in producing something useful. That orientation, toward function over form, toward the reader’s actual experience over the writer’s self-expression, is its own creative discipline, and it is one that a lot of more celebrated writers do not have.
The Book That Television Brought Into View
This year, Irene appeared on WDTN-TV’s Living Dayton segment, sharing her story through a sign language interpreter with a regional television audience. She spoke about the book, the writing process, and what she hoped it would do for the people who read it.
For Artist Weekly readers who understand what it takes to finish a long, difficult, personal project, her appearance on television is worth a second look. She was not talking about inspiration or healing or the power of storytelling. She was talking about a book she worked on for fourteen years, set aside, came back to, and finished despite physical pain and emotional interruption. She was talking about the work.
That is what the book is. Not a monument to suffering or a testimony to resilience. A piece of work, made carefully and over a long time, by someone who did not stop when it got hard and did not rush it when it needed more time.
Rising From the Abyss of Grief is available now. It took fourteen years to finish. It was worth the wait.
To learn more about Irene Tunanidas and her work, follow her on Facebook and Instagram.
